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Whaddaya Mean, You Can’t Have a Jacuzzi So Close to the Dinner Table?

Abandon all sanity, ye who enter here!

We have this room in our new house.

Okay, so we have more than one room, of course. We’re not living in a cave, or a big warehouse. Not any more, anyway. Damn those UPS security guards! The acoustics in that place were sweet!

Anyway, we’ve got this room, and we don’t know what the hell to do with it. See, we were lucky enough to buy a nice big house. But we’re not really ‘big house’ people. All right, maybe I belong in the ‘Big House’, but that’s different. Creepy, and scary, and different. At least when I drop the soap around here, I know the worst I’m gonna get is the dog biting my ass. And not in that fun, spanky way, either. No matter where I put the peanut butter.

Um, moving on… I may have said too much already.

So, back to the house. As I said, it’s a pretty big house. There are two full floors, plus an unfinished, but servicable, basement and a full-height attic. Full-height with loose floorboards, no walls and no insulation, perhaps, but still — full-height. Now, if you know anything about us, you’d know that we could never normally afford a place like this anywhere near Boston. Des Moines, maybe. Tuscaloosa, perhaps. Within three states of Boston? Not likely. Somewhere, there had to be a catch, of course.

Basically, our catch is three-pronged. Which makes it more of a pitchfork than a catch, I suppose. Or maybe a trident. But I’ll call it a catch, ’cause that’s how I started. I wouldn’t want to lose anyone with a change in nomenclature so late in the game.

So, the catches are these: first, the house is ninety-nine years old. It’s in good shape for its age, but then again, so is Ted Geisel.

(You know, Dr. Seuss? Children’s books, the Grinch and all that? And, oh yeah, dead. But still in better shape than most ninety-nine year olds. See what I’m sayin’?)

Second, the house is on a bit of a hill. It’s not Mount McKinley or anything, but there are close to forty steps leading from the street to the house. Now, I’m thirty-three. My wife is an indeterminate number of years younger. (Hint: it’s somewhere between one and fifteen, but don’t tell her I told you. She’d kill me.) So we’re more or less able to schlub up and down the steps at will, and probably will be able to for a dozen or more years. In old fart lingo, we’re still ‘spry little whippersnappers‘.

But do you think anyone who’s forty or so would want to strap themselves in for a ride that would include that trip every day? Sure, at forty they’d be fine, and maybe even forty-five. But soon the knees go. And then the hips. And then the boobs start sagging. Oh. Sorry. I guess that’s not really relevant; forget that last bit. But the legs — now that’s gonna be a problem. So, assuming we don’t do any creative major landscaping to install an escalator or something, we’re faced with a fairly limited resale market. Young folks, and probably with no kids, since there are a couple of places on the sides and out back where the hill gets pretty trecherous for the non-coordinated sort of folks.

(I keep my wife on a tether when we’re in the back yard, just in case. Oh man, now she’s really gonna kill me.)

Finally, there’s the neighbors. On one side, there’s Marti. I’ve written about Marti before. He’s a nice old guy. Friendly and all that, but living in a condemnable, eyesore deathtrap. He’s got no intention of moving, and he’s pretty spry himself, so he may be there long after we’re gone. Hell, he’s been there since 1948 as it is; he’ll probably still be wandering around the neighborhood with the cockroaches after the bombs go off. Resilient little dude, Marti is.

On the other side, we’ve got a duplex. I mentioned that we’re on a hill, right? Well, the duplex isn’t. To build it, the hill was chopped off, and the structure sits right at street level. Which means that there’s a large concrete wall, rising up to fifteen feet tall or so, holding up the part of the hill that our house is on. And the wall’s on the other guy’s property. And it’s crumbling. He doesn’t seem to be too concerned. The people that sold us the house were concerned, but not too concerned. Me, I’m fairly concerned. And my wife has nightmares about it. That’s concern, folks. So we’re weighing our options in that arena, and in the meantime, we try to spend as much time as we can on the other side of the house. Marti’s house may be ugly and decrepit, but at least we’re in no danger of toppling over onto it. Vice versa, maybe, but even that doesn’t seem to be immediately imminent. But the room where I write this is beside his house, so if the words suddenly stop, you may safely infer that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Again.

Speaking of rooms, let’s mosey back to the original subject. Now that you know how we came to afford this fabulous property, I want to bitch about one of the rooms.

(And to be fair, it is a really nice place. Don’t get me wrong with all the shit above. There’s not much we can do about the stairs, but the house is in fabulous shape. And we’ll eventually get something negotiated with the wall, and get Marti in a home or a nice Florida apartment or something, and then we’ll be just peachy. Really. We’re in good shape.)

So, back to this room of ours. First, I’ll tell you that we moved here from a four-room apartment. Kitchen, bedroom, guest room/office, and living room. Pretty basic stuff. No real yard, no porch to speak of, just the apartment. And we had nothing in storage, or that our parents were saving for us, or anything like that. We had four and a half rooms of furniture to our name.

(Because you always accumulate more shit than you have rooms, of course. And we did have two enormous closets there to stuff our crap into. So I’ll be fair and say four and a half.)

Now, this house has eight usable rooms right now. That’s twice as many.

(I know most of you know this, but I do have the occasional six-year-old, or Kentuckian, tuning in, so I like to spell things out for them. Thanks for your patience.) So, we had no problem filling up the kitchen, and our bedroom, and an office, and a guest room, and the living room. That’s five rooms, now full with four-and-a-half rooms of shit, plus some stuff we bought when we got here. Fine. But what to do with the other three?

Well, one of them is downstairs, connected to the kitchen. It’s got a chandelier and a built-in china hutch. (At least that’s what my wife says it is. I’m pretty sure I could use it to display my Star Wars action figure collection, or my set of erotic shot glasses, but she says no. So china it is. What a waste.) So, obviously, this is the ‘dining room’. We don’t have a dining room table, but we can find one some day. So this room is covered.

Another room is upstairs, across from the guest room. We really didn’t have a good purpose for this room, so we piled shit in it. Boxes, a desk, assorted crap. Eventually, we went in and looked around, and realized that most of the shit sort of went together. Our extra computer was there, and a bookshelf, and four more boxes of books, and magazines, and a reading lamp. Hey! So this became the ‘library’. Eventually, we’ll get a couple of overstuffed recliners, and maybe some footstools, and a crotchedy old lady to sit behind the desk and go ‘Sssshhhhh!‘. Not yet, but someday. So this room is covered.

That leaves the room attached to the dining room downstairs.

(No, not the kitchen, chucklebutt — the room attached to it the other way. C’mon, keep up, would ya?)

It’s open and airy, and faces the front of the house. It would be perfect for a living room… except that we’ve already got one. Currently, we’ve got a shelf full of pictures and knickknack crap in there, along with a ratty old magazine rack. Nothing inspiring as what the room should be, though. We’ve tried calling it the ‘den’, the ‘front room’, the ‘annex’. Even the ‘ballroom’. But none of them really fits.

So, my wife has this idea. This horrible, frightening idea. She wants to make it a ‘sitting room’, with couches and chairs. Nice couches and chairs, that I don’t think I’d be allowed to sit on when we don’t have company. Fancy-schmancy formal couches and chairs that wouldn’t be couches and chairs at all. They’d be art, not to be touched (except for regular cleaning), until important visitors came over. And to that I say — blech! Bleh, argh, yuck, and guh. And nuh-uh. You see where I’m goin’ with this?

See, what I don’t want is a wasted room. A space smelling of mothballs and spiderwebs that we dust off and use only for ‘special occasions’. If we’re gonna pay money and take the time to pick out couches, and chairs, and probably a nice rug, then I don’t want to enjoy them only if we’re entertaining the Norwegian royal family, all right? Is that so much to ask? Can there not be something there that makes us want to go into that room when it’s just us? Something fun, or cool, or interesting. I had a ‘sitting room’ in my house when I was growing up, and it drove me friggin’ nuts. ‘Don’t sit there! Don’t put your feet there! Stop peeing on the coffee table!‘ Stupid fuckin’ sitting room rules. Harrumph.

Now, to her credit, my wife is an extremely reasonable person. She saw that I was mildly distressed by her plan for the room.

(Maybe she noticed the frothing and twitchng, or maybe it was the stick I kept poking her with. I’m not really sure what subtle hint she picked up on; she’s very perceptive.) So we talked it over, and I told her all the stuff I’ve just told you. (Well, not all of it, of course. She knew all about the house already, and the old apartment, and all the furniture we had. Oh, and I left out the part where I peed on the coffee table. She doesn’t really need to know about that, I’m thinking. You know, just in case I ever want to do it again.) And she said, very reasonably (and therefore exquisitely maddeningly:

Okay, honey, that’s fair. So what do you want to do with the room?

Well, shit. I didn’t have an answer. I don’t mind having a room to sit in with company; I just wanted something that would let us use it in the meantime. But I didn’t know what the hell that something was. Honestly, do I have to have all the answers? Just once, I’d like to be able to bitch and moan and stamp my little feet about a reasonable idea around here without having to come up with an equally reasonable counter-example. I mean, that’s just… just… unreasonable.

So, I got nothin’. The living room’s got the TV and fireplace and stereo. The office has the computers. The library has all the books. And the kitchen has the food. What the hell else is there in the world that would make me want to walk into a room and sit down? (Assuming I was allowed to sit on the couch there in the first place; I’ll work on that little problem once I get this one licked. One dilemma at a time.) Honestly, I’ve got no answer. I simply can’t imagine why I’d walk in the door and go to the right, instead of left into the living room. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true; I can actually think of several things that would draw me into there, but my wife has put an additional stipulation on whatever I come up with: it has to be tasteful. Tasteful. So pinball machines and video games and inflatable dolls and a Jel-o wrestling pit are all out. (Okay, I didn’t check on the dolls. I’m just inferring based on the reaction to the Jell-o thing. Still, I don’t think it’s got much of a chance.)

So that’s where we’re at. Seven rooms down, and the eighth careening toward stuffy stodgy sucky poopyness, if I can’t come up with an idea that’s both interesting and tasteful. And what are the chances of that? Certainly, I have my share of interesting ideas, but I haven’t done ‘tasteful’ since the late ’70’s, at least. And probably not even then — do you remember anything from the seventies that was tasteful in the least? No, me either. Big bunch of tie-dyed, shag-carpeted ugly-assed disasters, that’s all I ever saw.

And I’m out of ideas for this room, too. So help me out, folks. Any ideas would help — what would you do, if you had a room like that? Your own little twelve by fourteen foot canvas, just waiting to be transformed into an oasis of coolness and fun. But not Jell-o, apparently. I suppose you can’t have it all. But send me those ideas, all right? The clock is ticking, and I desperately want to end up with a room I can use for more than peeing on the coffee table. We’ve got to keep it tasteful, after all.

A Name, a Name, a Name for Taming the Flames

Running shit up the flagpole to see who notices the smell.

So, this grill thing is really working out. I had really wondered about it, frankly. I mean, I wanted a grill for the backyard.

(What the hell else are backyards good for?)

And we needed a grill, if we were going to have a sizable housewarming barbecue (which we did, with close to thirty people showing up). But was I going to be any good at it? Would I like standing there grilling, when I’m really not a big fan of cooking? And dammit, how would I look? Would I make an ass out of myself, cooking on the lower rack when ‘indirect heat’ is called for, or using those grabby-picky-up things when I need the prongy-poky doohickey, or the flat, shovely kind of gizmo? (Yeah, obviously I’m not gonna bring up how I sound when I grill. There’s clearly no hope for me there.)

But so far, so good. Well, with respect to enjoying grilling, at least. I think I’m getting pretty good at it, and I don’t remember looking like a complete ass at any time when I’ve been out there, and no one’s called ‘party foul’ on me for using the wrong utensils, or dropping them on the ground. Or using them to scratch my crotch, or playfully smack the dog in the ass. (It’s probably a good thing that people aren’t watching too closely.)

My main concern was whether I’d like it, though. As I said, I’m not really much of a chef. Can’t be bothered, for the most part. See, I’m not really a ‘foodie’ at heart. Food’s more or less there, and I certainly like some items more than others, but I don’t wake up in the morning thinking, ‘Lasagna night! Oh, thank the gods it’s lasagna night. Oh boy oh boy oh boy, it’s lasagna day now, so lasagna night is coming right up. Be still, my widdle heart.‘ It’s just not typically on my radar.

As a matter of fact, I have a rule about cooking. Actually, I have several rules about cooking, but most of them involve the prevention and extinquishation of various fires that I’m likely to cause, so I won’t bore you with those. So, the one remaining culinary rule on my list is this:

No food — or Zeus forbid, beverage — should take me longer to prepare than it does to consume.

(I may have mentioned this before. Writing it here certainly seems familiar, but I don’t see any reference to this rule in the past couple of weeks, so it’s back in play, as far as I’m concerned. Plus, I do a lot of talking to myself, so maybe I’m just thinking of that. Who the hell knows?)

In any case, that’s my rule. And I’m a quick eater, folks. I’ll clean my plate, but I’m not gonna take all day doing it. So it shouldn’t take me all day to make, or it’s just not worth the trouble. Call it lazy, or stubborn, or bobbleheaded; I don’t care. That’s just how the brain cells that I have left choose to work, and there’s not much I can do about it at this point. So, I don’t toast my Pop-Tarts. I eat microwave dinners. I order pizza, or Chinese food.

(And yes, these often take longer to get to me than they take to eat. But I’m not cooking the whole time, so it doesn’t count. It’s all about how long it takes me to make something. And since I can spend a good solid hour peeling a potato, or boiling pasta, my self-cooked menu is rather limited.)

But, as it turns out, grilled food is different. Now, of course, I suspected that this might be so. We males seem to have a ‘grill gene’ that gives us a special affinity for all things charbroiled, and the process involved in said charbroiling. But I wasn’t sure I had that gene. My strong inclination is to get the cooking started and the eating finished as quickly as possible, so as to get back to whatever inane TV show or pointless video game (or yes, ridiculously long blog post) that I was working on beforehand. I feared that the grill would not change this ingrained behavior, and that we’d use it only for parties and cookoouts, watching it rust and ruin in the meantime.

Happily, nothing could be further from the truth. As soon as I saw the grill, that dormant gene kicked in, and a bulb snapped on over my head. *POP* ‘Must… grill… meat. Must… marinate. Must… soak… dead… animals… in… beer… Unnnngggghh.‘ And there I lay, in the Grill Center at Lowe’s, with visions of tenderloins dancing in my head. When I came to, I was reborn a Grill Man. I had come of age.

Y’know, come to think of it, I don’t have my Grill Name yet. A few years ago, grilling on Hibachis was all the rage amongst our friends — partly for the charcoal flavor, mostly because none of them had the money to afford anything nicer — and we gave out Grill Names to all the flame-wrangling members of the tribe. There was ‘Grill Daddy‘ and ‘The Grillin’ Fool‘ and ‘The Grill Master‘. We had a ‘Grillinator‘, a ‘Grillin’ Machine‘, and ‘Grillasaurus Rex‘. Sadly, the apartment my wife and I shared had no place for a grill. So while I was steeped in the lore and the juicy flame-kissed goodness of all that is grill, I was unable to earn my Hibachi merit badge, or be awarded a Grill Name.

Now, of course, I need one. Our little wonder can do charcoal or gas, and I’ve been practicing the blackening arts for a while now. I ‘ve grilled beer-soaked brats and countless burgers. I’ve got steak and pork tenderloin and veggie skewers under my belt. And I’ve mastered the overnight-marinated Jamaican jerk chicken.

(And joke all you want about me jerkin’ my meat, there, skippy. You’d be jerkin’ yours if you tasted this chicken. This shit rocks!)

I’ve even started to experiment with rubs and sauces and indirect heat… why, I’m a grillin’ fool!

(Except that name’s already taken. Dammit!)

So, now my rule’s out the window. I’ll spend a half hour heating up the grill, or the coals, and then another half hour cooking something that I can eat in ten minutes or less. I’m finding that the key is to use the entire grill, so I don’t feel so bad about it. Eight chicken breasts take only slightly longer to grill than two, and at least that way, I can envision taking an hour in total to eat them all. Plus, the eating’s spread over two or three days, so it seems more worth the effort. These are the mind games I have to play with myself to get any sleep at night, folks. Welcome to my nightmare.

Anyway, I’m ready for my name, now. I’m considering a move to the Philippines, so I can become the ‘Grilla of Manila‘. That would make for one helluva commute for my wife to downtown Boston, though. Ooh, how ’bout something from the ‘hood? I could be ‘Grill Grill Cool J‘. Oh, except I don’t have a ‘J’ in my name anywhere. That would just lead to all sorts of annoying questions. Hmmm. ‘Grilly Madison‘? Might give the wrong impression, though it wasn’t a bad movie. ‘Mister Grill‘?

(You know, ‘Mister Grill, that’s my name; that name again is Mister Grill.’)

Okay, so the non-Simpsons fans wouldn’t get that one. The Grill Name must speak to all the people. Shit. Oh, wait. ‘Charcoal Charlie‘! Um… nah. Sounds like some fucked-up cartoon character from the ’30’s or something.

Well, hell, I don’t know. I’ll have to give this some more thought, I suppose. Maybe something will come to me while the next batch of jerk chicken is sizzling on the grill tomorrow.

(And no, I’m not gonna be the ‘Grill Jerk‘, or the ‘Jerky Griller‘, and especially not the ‘Jerky Grill Guy Who Jerkily Jerks His Jerk Meat‘. So don’t even say it. But if you have any real suggestions for a Grill Name, I’d love to hear them. Or, you know, see them, anyway. So send ’em along. Maybe I’ll find my Grill Name, after all.)